Friday Bullets, because all the cool kids do it

Since others have been doing bullets weekly, I thought I'd jump on the bandwagon. 

*  It stinks to work late on the last day of the month, especially when it falls on a Friday.  Even stinkier: to inadvertently do something to take the entire computer system down at 5:45pm when everyone is busy trying to get things finished for the day.  When the crashing culprit and the computer fixer are one and the same, things don't get any better.  

* You can call me a loser.  Recently lost:  a glove, a set of keys, my favorite hat (oh really cool NYC hat, please come back to me!  Please!), lens cap to my telephoto lens, and my Rx sunglasses.   Probably a lot of other things that I don't even realize yet that I have misplaced.  In addition to the thousand of thoughts that I meant to say, do, or write down before they slipped through the gray matter. 

* Including the thought I was going to write here....

* The month goes really fast at work when you've been on vacation for most of it.   Easy task when weekly status and monthly status reports covered the same time span.   Having to add that you were the root cause of the only downtime this month because of  something stupid:  priceless.  See first bullet point. 

*  Funniest thing I've seen this week:  Tracy Ullman as Rachel Maddow & Ariana Huffington, w/ Meghan McCain and Barney Frank.  Can't decide which character Ullman is best at impersonating.  It's hard not to think that it is Huffington, but the other characters are nearly perfect as well.  Makes me want to subscribe to Showtime so that I could watch all of Ullman's shows.

 

* Have made progress on Emily's TBR challenge.  At least on the reading part.  Not so much for the posting part. 

* Even if you think you hate opera, you should make an attempt to see the Met HD rebroadcast of Carmen at a theater near you this Wednesday, 2/3 @ 6:30.  I saw it when it aired live a few weeks ago.  It was wonderful.  Elana Garanca & Roberta Alagna spark and sparkle in this production.   Olivier Award-winning director Richard Eyre about his new production of Bizet's drama says: "It is one of the inalienably great works of art. It's sexy, in every sense. And I think it should be shocking."  I have a friend whose Indian-born husband says he will go to the opera because it reminds him of Bollywood.  Productions like this one of Carmen make me understand that comparison -- song, dance, passion, humor, tragedy; it has it all.   This video is from the London production last year.  

*  At the beginning of December, I thought it was silly that the neighbors decorated a very tall tree with lights in the shape of a palm tree.  Now that it is 8 degrees, I see it differently.   I hope they leave it up until warm weather has arrived.  

* I made up a new cocktail this evening.  I didn't have the ingredients for what I wanted, so it was a little of this, a little of that, from the licquer cabinet.   Hmmm...if I can recreate it, perhaps I'll think of a name and publish the receipe.  Unfortunately, too much whiskey tends to make one forget the details. 

* This is pretty cool.  The history of the world told through 100 objects from the British Museum, produced by BBC 4.   10 episodes have been produced thus far.   So interesting that if all 100 were currently available, I'd have a hard time tearing my weary body away from the computer for a 25 hr period until I had watched them all.